Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

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I'm writing this as an Iranian immigrant, and feel compelled to say so because it is apparently and depressingly necessary in order to lend legitimacy to my statements (though I don't think it does).

The idea that a white American can't understand non-white non-American views, makes the same amount of sense the other way around. Both ways around need a great deal of research by the ones trying to understand, and I believe she's tried her best.

I'll go even further and say that she understands some things better than those in the culture she's covering, since she's an outside observer, giving her some objectivity that those inside can't have. I know I have this with the particular "white" culture I'm integrating into right now.

I will say that there are some things she'll find difficult to impossible to grasp -- and might not even realise she's missing -- but to say she's not even allowed to try belittles us as human beings. This exclusionary race mentality can go away.

Even if the film was made by a non-white non-American muslim, the implication of their reasoning would be that any white/American/non-muslim wouldn’t be able to properly understand the film.

This comes close to denying that there can ever be an understanding between cultures at all.

It is peculiar how the segregationist isolationists and cancel-culture-peddlers use exactly the same lines of reasoning, while 1 gets tagged as racist and the other a radically anti-racist.

It is about time for people to look at the core ethics that guide either thought and at least draw the association between the two. What to name this collective community is anyone's guess, but at least the cognitive dissonance will be gone.

To aspire to understand each other is at the core of facilitating diversity and inclusion. That includes asking stupid questions, difficult questions and sometimes offensive questions. It includes tolerating faux pas and cultural appropriation.

And lastly, it requires treating other communities with the capacity for occasionally just as much good and at other times just as much malice as any other community suffering from the human condition.

It’s not just peculiar, the fight against the injustices of racism has become racist. They aren’t separate now, they are actually the same.

Having spent so long fighting against something, the movement has accepted the premise of the things they were fighting against and started fighting for it. Reinforcing separation between people, putting labels on a person, and declaring what a person is allowed to do based on those labels.

They are explicitly for dividing people into races and giving each of those groups permissions.

Racism = being in favor of dividing people into races.

It's what happens when one's multiculturalism integer-overflows into becoming outright segregationism.

We need more dialogue between cultures, not less.

Luckily you posted this anonymously because if your name was ever tied to a comment like this, you'd face the wrath of the woke mob. Your comment is extremely benign as far as "right-wing" comments go, but if you would've posted this on your company Slack, you'd be crucified.

Thank you for posting this. Many of us agree with you.

why is that's a right-wing comment? :o

Anything that stands in defiance of leftism, especially leftist identity politics is "right-wing" now. That's how far the Overton Window has shifted.

That’s a claim but it’s not true. If you actually talk to people you’ll find out that the crazy cancel racist left is actually a very small loud group and few real people actually align with them. The rest of the left just doesn’t speak up because they don’t care to get into fights.

that's certainly a claim, but I think it's how far political polarization hysteria moved the range of public discourse.

there's a very big center. (dare I say it's the plurality?)

despite the news most folks are solidly boring when it comes to politics, and the loud minorities are ... loud minorities.

redefining (the already barely useful) left/right because of them is an unforced error IMHO

To throwawayallday's point though, I do think there's two large trends that tend to lead to this sort of labelling, one in America, and one in the context of the Anglosphere and much of Europe.

In America the Democrats, as the left-er of the two major parties, tend to bend heavily to the will of any adjacent loud minority and eagerly adopt their rhetoric, even if they don't adopt their policies. This gets amplified in both directions by social media, especially Twitter, where advocates press politicians for vocal sup[port, that when given increases the demand and visibility of these requests, ad infinitum.

In the Anglosphere and much of Europe, there is a common pattern of some subset of (usually young) people viewing all issues, even local ones, through an American lens. I have no idea how America established such an overwhelming level of political-cultural imperialism in the last decade or so, but at this point it seems ubiquitous. A discussion on America's policies causes everyone else to examine and start dialogue on their own policies, almost without fail. This leads to any American hot button issues becoming the issue of the week for dozens of countries, and it's all framed through American battle lines.

Yeah. I feel weird that BLM movement is treated as a global problem, like OSS project or GCP API page have static banner for that. I completely agree for BLM and racial crimination is a worldwide problem, but BLM (specifically blacks are killed by police) is a specific problem in the US.

Wow, man, that must be insanely frustrating

I've only had much experience with US culture in the USA, and living in Japan. I guess the language/cultural barrier between the US and Japan is still substantial enough that US politics don't really make their way into the Japanese zeitgeist, since I never heard anything about US politics from anyone I know living there other than Americans.

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